I-Umall

As any child running around the park holding a plastic raygun will tell you, most issues can be resolved by the correct application of a suitable amount of lasers, preferably of the pew-pew variety. However, one startup is aiming to solve the very real problem of orbital debris by using honest-to-goodness satellite mounted space lasers, which may end up proving once and for all that our childhood instincts were correct. 

The satellites are planned to be operated by Orbital Lasers, a startup backed by Japanese satellite operator SKY Perfect JSAT, and have been jointly designed by the operator in collaboration with the Riken research institute (via The Register). The plan is to use a technique called laser ablation to emit a powerful laser beam that vaporises the surface of a targeted piece of debris, and it’s the impulse emitted from this vaporisation that can not only prevent it from rotating in its current trajectory, but also be used to decelerate it, causing it to fall…

I don’t know what the partner cap on polyamory is, but this determined Stardew Valley player has definitely surpassed it by marrying 63 people simultaneously. If you have clocked the fact that there are not 63 people in the entirety of Pelican Town, Calico Desert, or Ginger Island from update 1.5, then you will not be surprised to hear that this was achieved with a hell of a lot of mods.

Streamer Yinny has posted quite a lot of modded Stardew Valley videos (many of which involve sexual dialogue mods so do beware the links) and last year undertook the challenge of simultaneously marrying 23 people in Stardew Valley. She achieved that feat with Free Love, a mod which allows you to have multiple spouses. I expected “multiple” to be, you know, like three maybe. 

But even 23 was not enough for Yinny, who has now gone on to marry a total of 63 people in Stardew Valley. She’s shown off her entire village (and then some) of spouses, who march into bed together each n…

Cyberpunk. One of the few genres of fiction where life is so, so, so much worse than the here and now, and fans go, “Ooh, neon,” and sigh wistfully at the prettiness of raindrops splattering on glowing adverts of cyborg geisha. 

In the latest trailer for Nivalis, the life sim from the studio that gave us Cloudpunk, we’ve gotten a glimpse of the story that propels our character to set up their own enterprise in the recesses of this grubby city. 

In Ion Lands’ previous game, Cloudpunk, the player flitted between the skyscrapers fulfilling jobs as a driver for a courier company, but if you looked a little closer, you could see small citizens skittering hither and thither. The team built upon this enlarging those little peoples’ lives into a business sim. Yet Nivalis is offering more than monitoring incomes and expenses. 

Shown off in the PC Gaming Show, the story trailer introduces us to the nameless artificial intelligence that will …

Typically, galaxy-brained hijinks like the one I’m about to dive into are usually confined to the realms of pen and paper—abusing some quirk from a DM’s homebrew rulings in a game of Dungeons and Dragons.

But thanks to some of Larian’s design decisions, druids in Baldur’s Gate 3 can turn their owlbear wildshape into a living meteor, using it to deal anywhere from 800 to a whopping 1,170 damage against the right enemy. For context, I have my Monster Manual open in front of me: an Adult Red Dragon, a monster designed to pose a threat to a party of four level 17 characters, has 256 hit points. This is enough to kill that monster four times.

You can see the devastating effect of this bug fluffy meteor for yourself down below—first by Reddit user Fishbleb, who uses it to flatten an Act 1 boss, and later by streamer Ellohime, who drops in “from the top rope” for 800 damage during Act 2.

So apparent…

We’re big fans of the latest OLED gaming monitors, but they do share one obvious issue. They’re all a bit short on pixels. But new roadmaps from the two big noises in OLED panel production, LG and Samsung, reportedly fix that with both 27-inch and 32-inch high-refresh 4K options incoming.

Of course, you can currently buy OLED gaming monitors and indeed TVs with the full 4K. But they’re all 42-inch and up models, so arguably oversized for desktop use. At that panel size, the pixel density isn’t all that either.

Salvation comes in the form of TFT Central’s latest OLED roadmap update. Happily, a number of new OLED panels are in the works that look absolutely ideal. 

For starters, both LG and Samsung have some new actually-monitor-sized 4K OLED panels in the works. Both are working on 27-inch and 32-inch models and they’re all set to offer full 240Hz refresh.

True to existing form, LG’s will use its WOLED tech while Samsung’s will be QD-OLED. Another intrigu…

Counter-Strike 2 seems to have got off to a solid start, but a few weeks after launch Valve has announced some big decisions. These will only affect a small number of players, but even so this is a real line in the sand that reflects the developer’s ambition to develop this game for a decade or more.

“Counter-Strike 2 represents the largest technical leap in CS history,” says a Valve statement, “and our goal is to continue to develop Counter-Strike for years to come. As technology advances, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue support for older hardware, including DirectX 9 and 32-bit operating systems. Similarly, we will no longer support macOS.”

Sorry Apple fans: you’re out. This may seem a rather hard-headed decision but, as Valve goes on to explain, all of these systems that are losing support “represented less than one percent of active CS:GO players.” It also needs to be seen in the context of Apple’s own recently announced Game Porting Tool…

Unforetold: Witchstone was maybe the biggest surprise for me at our PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted showcase. The Spearhead Games CRPG almost evokes Larian’s first Divinity: Original Sin game in its presentation, but instead of pursuing cinematic RPG production values, Witchstone is like an alternate evolutionary path emphasizing the construction of an open-ended, RPG sandbox.

“Freedom alone is cool, but you want that world to respond. In tabletop, you have a game master, you have other players, there’s always a response,” explains Spearhead co-founder and creative director, Malik Boukhira in an expanded interview with PC Gamer, noting that real videogame freedom “is also about creativity, feeling clever, feeling like you did things your way.”

The RPG’s promised influence system sounds like almost nothing I’ve seen in an RPG. You can turn up the charm on any NPC in the game, using your capacity for persuasion, intimidation, or downright lying to get anybody to do pr…

Update: Looks like Ubisoft’s given up trying to keep this one quiet. In a post on Twitter, the company threw in the towel and admitted it has a 20th anniversary remaster of BG&E on the way, with more info to come in early 2024. The company also said that the build that went out to Ubisoft+ subscribers as part of this leak “is not indicative of the final game,” so there’s some hope for those of us put off by those dodgy screenshots making the rounds.

Original story: For years, Ubisoft has had one, single job: Not releasing Beyond Good and Evil games. To its credit, it’s done the work with aplomb for a good long while now. Sure, sometimes we’ll get some fanciful BG&E 2 trailer, a LinkedIn bio will change, or Joseph Gordon-Levitt will appear, but the studio’s fundamental principle of not releasing a game in this series has never wavered.

Until yesterday. A few months after the ESRB leaked that Ubisoft was working on some kind of…

Now that Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has a new developer, The Chinese Room, we’re going through the whole rigamarole of teasers and reveals all over again, starting now and carrying on into 2024, and possibly beyond. I hope you’re prepared. 

This is why, more than four years after I wrote “Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2’s first full-blood clan is the Brujah”, I’m once again introducing you all to the Brujah. I am very tired. And while the 2019 reveal gave us details on the Brujah Disciplines—their fancy vamp powers—we’ll have to assume they have all been changed in at least some way. Unfortunately, this re-reveal doesn’t go into much detail. 

All we know about this version of the clan is that they are very into smacking things around in melee combat, and their first revealed Discipline is a charge attack that lets the undead brawlers gain momentum before grabbing foes, dragging them around and slamming them into things…